Faith-Healing Parents Arrested for Death of Second Child

[Ahriman238]

I, for one, am curious where in the bible it states that using medicine is a sin? I have always interpreted the bible as God basically saying "Yeah I got your back when the shit hits the fan, but I won't do everything for you". So I can't see God being angry for taking your child to the hospital. I can actually see him being more angry for expecting him to do something instead of biting the bullet and getting a bottle of pills.

What was the joke? Something like: A man hears on the radio that there will be a flood. Because he is deeply religious and sees himself as a righteous man, he knows God will save him and is unconcerned. Later, the sheriff comes by in a pickup truck to make sure he heard about the flood and is ready to evacuate, and the man says "I am a man of God, and God shall protect me." The sheriff tries to reason with the man for a while, and pleads, but eventually has to leave to check up on other people. As the waters are rising, a National Guard helicopter flies overhead and a voice calls down that they're going to evacuate him. The man waves them off, shouting that the Lord will not let him drown.

Naturally, he drowns. When he reaches heaven (having actually been fairly righteous, all things considered) he rudely demands an audience with God, as many people do after dying. He scolds the Lord for not protecting he, who had believed so hard, and God replies "What do you want? I sent you a radio message, a truck and a helicopter."

[the atom]

As for the level of suffering, I can agree to an extent. I think that Atheists still suffer more hate on the whole - outside of when people are fired up about Muslims - just because they are often seen as the enemy of all religions. A stance that is understandable given the views of people like myself. Though I would hope that they could see that I hate the religion and not the people that follow them.

I might be going out on a limb here, but maybe it's because so many vocal atheists are in fact giant cocks who hold a lot of terrible opinions? Religion probably has something to do with it, but I have a strong sense people like Mr. Richard "Muslims are stupid" Dawkins aren't helping the cause.

[Grumman]

I might be going out on a limb here, but maybe it's because so many vocal atheists are in fact giant cocks who hold a lot of terrible opinions? Religion probably has something to do with it, but I have a strong sense people like Mr. Richard "Muslims are stupid" Dawkins aren't helping the cause.

Why, because he is wrong, or because it hurts people's feelings? If Richard Dawkins can talk to a random Muslim cleric and get him to admit that ex-Muslims should be executed, whose fault is that?

[Juubi Karakuchi]

Matthew 4:7 - "Jesus answered, "It is also written: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

Strange that they should forget this little snippet, from a book they place such value on.

[Broomstick]

I might be going out on a limb here, but maybe it's because so many vocal atheists are in fact giant cocks who hold a lot of terrible opinions? Religion probably has something to do with it, but I have a strong sense people like Mr. Richard "Muslims are stupid" Dawkins aren't helping the cause.

Why, because he is wrong, or because it hurts people's feelings? If Richard Dawkins can talk to a random Muslim cleric and get him to admit that ex-Muslims should be executed, whose fault is that?

There is disagreeing with people and then there is trolling. I know a lot of atheists who go through life co-existing with religious people without getting into constant conflicts. I know other atheists who are constantly provoking fights then wondering why they're disliked.

Fact is, the world is composed predominantly of religious people. If you deliberately piss on something they consider important they're not going to react well. On the other hand, there are ways to be respectful of people who are wrong in your eyes without provoking a conflict most of the time.

[Zaune]

I, for one, am curious where in the bible it states that using medicine is a sin? I have always interpreted the bible as God basically saying "Yeah I got your back when the shit hits the fan, but I won't do everything for you". So I can't see God being angry for taking your child to the hospital. I can actually see him being more angry for expecting him to do something instead of biting the bullet and getting a bottle of pills.

It probably doesn't, except in some ridiculously vague sense that could mean just about anything. See: something that sounds vaguely unflattering about homosexuals if you squint in the Gospel of St Paul and the whole Mark of Cain thing.

[Ralin]

I, for one, am curious where in the bible it states that using medicine is a sin? I have always interpreted the bible as God basically saying "Yeah I got your back when the shit hits the fan, but I won't do everything for you". So I can't see God being angry for taking your child to the hospital. I can actually see him being more angry for expecting him to do something instead of biting the bullet and getting a bottle of pills.

It probably doesn't, except in some ridiculously vague sense that could mean just about anything. See: something that sounds vaguely unflattering about homosexuals if you squint in the Gospel of St Paul and the whole Mark of Cain thing.

I vaguely remember hearing someone of this persuasion (on a TV show, so take that with a grain of salt) say something about how they believe "Christ is the healer."

I think the general idea is that God wants them to trust God to heal them and not doctors.

[Highlord Laan]

I, for one, am curious where in the bible it states that using medicine is a sin? I have always interpreted the bible as God basically saying "Yeah I got your back when the shit hits the fan, but I won't do everything for you". So I can't see God being angry for taking your child to the hospital. I can actually see him being more angry for expecting him to do something instead of biting the bullet and getting a bottle of pills.

It probably doesn't, except in some ridiculously vague sense that could mean just about anything. See: something that sounds vaguely unflattering about homosexuals if you squint in the Gospel of St Paul and the whole Mark of Cain thing.

I vaguely remember hearing someone of this persuasion (on a TV show, so take that with a grain of salt) say something about how they believe "Christ is the healer."

I think the general idea is that God wants them to trust God to heal them and not doctors.

Which is "testing" their god and run directly counter to what is stated in their own fragging fairy tale collection. Knowing that would require them to actually read the book beyond whichever passages their priest or whatever tells them to, and would mean that they're not a good, obedient, brainless little flock in need of a shepherd they're supposed to be.

[PainRack]

I, for one, am curious where in the bible it states that using medicine is a sin? I have always interpreted the bible as God basically saying "Yeah I got your back when the shit hits the fan, but I won't do everything for you". So I can't see God being angry for taking your child to the hospital. I can actually see him being more angry for expecting him to do something instead of biting the bullet and getting a bottle of pills.

http://biblia.com/bible/esv/2%20Chronicles%2016.12
In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa was afflicted with a disease in his feet. Though his disease was severe, even in his illness he did not seek help from the LORD, but only from the physicians

Its....... taken a tad out of context because the crux of the matter is that Asa didn't believe in the Lord healing powers, instead of seeking help from the priests, he sought out healers.

Its... especially jarring for modern day readers because we forget what the context was in that era, essentially, Yahweh priests using the Lord power to heal or magicians using power to heal. Both sides used a variety of concoctions and aids to improve healing, both were equally dubious. So, the passage was a rebuke against someone using heathen magic for healing instead of the priests holy powers.......

(Of course, the contextual message is that Asa died and he was used as a religious scapegoat/tarred for propaganda purposes)


However, I think you ignore the crux of why Christian Scientists and other faith healers ignore medicine. Its not because the Bible views the use of medicine as a sin, but because the Bible preaches that Christian disciples have the power to heal.
Jesus espouses that one of the mark of his disciples was the ability to heal.
We have that above passage from Chronicles.
James 5:14 preach that if you are ill, you should go to the church and be anointed with oil, presumably so that God can heal you through the church elders.


Its a form of magic to them. The difference is just the tools. For the above parents, prayer and oil was all that was needed. For others, medicine or even surgery is just part of the 'magic' of god and it will work, with the blessings of prayer... I mean, that's why there was a lawsuit in the US, because said woman blamed the physician of malpractice because he did not pray for her recovery........


There's also a variety of beliefs, from Inner Healing, God miracle healing, of how disease is a spiritual problem or caused by demons(albeit found more in third world countries than in the West).........

[Channel72]

^ Meh.... considering that one of the original evangelists was apparently a doctor, I'm not sure that the faith healer mentality is entirely Biblically justified. (Questions about the historicity of that particular tradition are of course irrelevant to this discussion.)

Then again, I can't really blame the faith healers. The Gospels and Acts are filled to the brim with incidents involving miraculous cures via faith magic. It's not exactly like there's some rigorous science behind the theology, but I get the impression from the Gospels that miraculous cures were normally reserved for incurable diseases, like leprosy or epilepsy, or physical deformities... and that "mundane" health problems could acceptably be remedied by human medicine.

[Zaune]

Which is "testing" their god and run directly counter to what is stated in their own fragging fairy tale collection. Knowing that would require them to actually read the book beyond whichever passages their priest or whatever tells them to, and would mean that they're not a good, obedient, brainless little flock in need of a shepherd they're supposed to be.

Didn't Martin Luther have something rather pithy to say on this subject? My old history teacher was right; however far back in history you look, human nature doesn't change much.

[Simon_Jester]

At the heart of the problem is this: in ancient societies there was no such thing as medicine as we know it, and the services of a good doctor were pretty much indistinguishable from what a decent physical trainer could do for you today, medically speaking. If a change in diet, lifestyle and exercise (often not even one we'd endorse scientifically today) didn't help, you were screwed. What this kind of doctor did was perfectly understandable, but also largely useless.

As a result, the ancients (correctly, in the context of their knowledge) viewed disease as this weird mysterious thing no human had any real influence over. It went away, or it didn't, and nobody could say or control how that happened. That made it the province of magic.

And there was nothing in the body of thought then dominant to convince anyone that "a spirit did it" was a worse explanation than "some purely mundane thing we don't understand did it." Saying that various gods, demons, spirits and curses made disease happen was literally as good an explanation as anything else on offer, as far as they knew.

Modern faith-healing churches, which are usually pretty tightly cloistered in terms of their cultural reference pool, are holdovers of this older mindset. To the practitioners, modern scientific knowledge is a form of magic. It may not explicitly invoke pagan deities or unknown spirits, but it's just another "way." Epistemologically (if they knew that word), it's a priori coequal with the "way" of their religion. Or would be... except that they already take as the basic working premise of their lives that the Bible is literal inerrant truth.

So, short form, their magic-knowledge is stronger magic than "science's" magic-knowledge. They are pretty much doing the same thing that an ancient Israelite would do in refusing to go to priests of someone else's gods to pray for healing. It's brand-loyalty rather than a belief that the scientific medicine doesn't work as such.

And the heart of the problem is that these people are utterly ignorant of what "science" really means in the modern world. This is demonstrated by one such group's use of the phrase "Christian Science" to describe their religion in the first place.

[Lord of the Abyss]

I, for one, am curious where in the bible it states that using medicine is a sin? I have always interpreted the bible as God basically saying "Yeah I got your back when the shit hits the fan, but I won't do everything for you". So I can't see God being angry for taking your child to the hospital. I can actually see him being more angry for expecting him to do something instead of biting the bullet and getting a bottle of pills.

What was the joke? Something like: A man hears on the radio that there will be a flood. Because he is deeply religious and sees himself as a righteous man, he knows God will save him and is unconcerned. Later, the sheriff comes by in a pickup truck to make sure he heard about the flood and is ready to evacuate, and the man says "I am a man of God, and God shall protect me." The sheriff tries to reason with the man for a while, and pleads, but eventually has to leave to check up on other people. As the waters are rising, a National Guard helicopter flies overhead and a voice calls down that they're going to evacuate him. The man waves them off, shouting that the Lord will not let him drown.

Naturally, he drowns. When he reaches heaven (having actually been fairly righteous, all things considered) he rudely demands an audience with God, as many people do after dying. He scolds the Lord for not protecting he, who had believed so hard, and God replies "What do you want? I sent you a radio message, a truck and a helicopter."

There are Christians who believe that helping yourself in any way shows a lack of faith, and you should just pray and wait for God to solve your problems. I recall a family of such Christians making the news some years ago when they complained about The Wizard of Oz being in their school library, because Dorothy had the power to go home by her own efforts using her slippers instead of relying on God.

And yeah I know that's an extreme view; but it's only the extremists who will do things like let their kids die in the first place.

As for the level of suffering, I can agree to an extent. I think that Atheists still suffer more hate on the whole - outside of when people are fired up about Muslims - just because they are often seen as the enemy of all religions. A stance that is understandable given the views of people like myself. Though I would hope that they could see that I hate the religion and not the people that follow them.

I might be going out on a limb here, but maybe it's because so many vocal atheists are in fact giant cocks who hold a lot of terrible opinions?

No. I recall as a teen reading in the religion section of the local newspaper an article by some bishop talking about how it's "better to kill for Kali" than it is to do good as an atheist. Because killing for a "false goddess" upholds faith, while doing good as an atheist undermines it; and nothing matters more than faith. The hatred for atheists was deep long before there were any "vocal atheists"; history demonstrates that atheists can remain silent and they'll still be regarded as monsters.

Atheists on a regular basis are compared to Stalin (there's even an ongoing thread about it here), and a standard anti-atheist argument is that without religion people are all amoral monsters who will run around killing and raping and looting. The fact is an atheist could go on a killing spree without making the view of atheism by believers significantly worse, because that's exactly what believers typically think atheists are like already.

[Simon_Jester]

That view is held by some people who believe in deities, but not in others. It's not like there aren't sympathetic portrayals in fiction, for instance, of hard-boiled characters who lose their faith in pretty much everything after traumatic experiences and hard times.

If everyone with a religion thought the way you refer to, such works would be hounded out of the marketplace.

Again, the problem comes back to a relatively small section of the population with a limited reference pool, who are ignorant of things outside that pool and willfully segregate themselves from it. No one joins that section without first being semi-brainwashed into accepting their definitions of 'faith' and 'truth,' so they get a very distorted view of the outside world.

[Lord of the Abyss]

That view is held by some people who believe in deities, but not in others. It's not like there aren't sympathetic portrayals in fiction, for instance, of hard-boiled characters who lose their faith in pretty much everything after traumatic experiences and hard times.

The idea that someone has to be emotionally crippled to be an atheist isn't much better, frankly. Nor is it all that sympathetic; it's just another way of saying that if you're an atheist something has to be wrong with you.

[Ralin]

That view is held by some people who believe in deities, but not in others. It's not like there aren't sympathetic portrayals in fiction, for instance, of hard-boiled characters who lose their faith in pretty much everything after traumatic experiences and hard times.

The idea that someone has to be emotionally crippled to be an atheist isn't much better, frankly. Nor is it all that sympathetic; it's just another way of saying that if you're an atheist something has to be wrong with you.

And more often than not they're not so much atheists as Christians who are angry at God.

[Simon_Jester]

I'd rather be characterized as someone who loses faith because of a lack of anything obvious to believe in, than as someone who never had a capacity for faith because of being morally depraved. Mostly because I don't like being labelled as depraved.

[Lord of the Abyss]

I'd rather be characterized as someone who loses faith because of a lack of anything obvious to believe in, than as someone who never had a capacity for faith because of being morally depraved.

You aren't being characterized as losing faith due to a lack of evidence; you are being portrayed as losing faith due to being emotionally crippled.

[Alyrium Denryle]

That view is held by some people who believe in deities, but not in others. It's not like there aren't sympathetic portrayals in fiction, for instance, of hard-boiled characters who lose their faith in pretty much everything after traumatic experiences and hard times.

The idea that someone has to be emotionally crippled to be an atheist isn't much better, frankly. Nor is it all that sympathetic; it's just another way of saying that if you're an atheist something has to be wrong with you.

That is not the same thing as being an emotional cripple. An emotionally crippled person would not become upset enough to lose their faith. It is like when someone you care about betrays you. It hurts more than if some faceless underling did so, because you care about the person.

[Simon_Jester]

Eh. Maybe I perceive a different mindset in those fictional characters who look at the world and say "there's no God to believe in," and see them as disillusioned but not as 'emotional cripples.'

At the very least, they're not portrayed as rampaging amoral perverts as a rule.

[the atom]

No. I recall as a teen reading in the religion section of the local newspaper an article by some bishop talking about how it's "better to kill for Kali" than it is to do good as an atheist. Because killing for a "false goddess" upholds faith, while doing good as an atheist undermines it; and nothing matters more than faith. The hatred for atheists was deep long before there were any "vocal atheists"; history demonstrates that atheists can remain silent and they'll still be regarded as monsters.

Atheists on a regular basis are compared to Stalin (there's even an ongoing thread about it here), and a standard anti-atheist argument is that without religion people are all amoral monsters who will run around killing and raping and looting. The fact is an atheist could go on a killing spree without making the view of atheism by believers significantly worse, because that's exactly what believers typically think atheists are like already.

Oh yeah, there's also the persecution complex. Right, thanks for reminding me. No, the big problem with atheism in this day and age is the fact that vocal atheists are, by and large, terrible people with awful opinions. Take it from an atheist who's spent most of his life living in community populated almost solely by believers and used to see everything the way you do: If it seems like everyone is out to get you for your lack of faith in God, it's more then likely you're actually being a huge asshole about it to everyone around you.

[Metahive]

Oh yeah, there's also the persecution complex. Right, thanks for reminding me. No, the big problem with atheism in this day and age is the fact that vocal atheists are, by and large, terrible people with awful opinions. Take it from an atheist who's spent most of his life living in community populated almost solely by believers and used to see everything the way you do: If it seems like everyone is out to get you for your lack of faith in God, it's more then likely you're actually being a huge asshole about it to everyone around you.

Yeah, it couldn't possibly be that it's just you who's just a jerk and stand-offish. Nope, must be something inherently wrong with atheism because you've done your research with an extensive testing group of one person.

[the atom]

Yeah, it couldn't possibly be that it's just you who's just a jerk and stand-offish. Nope, must be something inherently wrong with atheism because you've done your research with an extensive testing group of one person.

As opposed to rigorous statistical analysis like "I read an article by a crazy bishop this one time years ago who said that atheists are teh evuls and clearly this means all believers hate atheists oh I'm so oppressed!!" am I right guys?

Somehow I don't think it's a coincidence that the atheists who complain the most about the horrible oppression they experience tend to be the ones who are also the the biggest *gasp shock* stand-offish jerks (and quite often massive bigots).

But who knows? I haven't done the statistical analysis that proves I'm not literally the single atheist on earth who, despite spending his entire existence in an area with an overwhelmingly Christian population, found that he stopped taking flak from christians when he stopped openly harassing them and their beliefs (which in my case was at the age of 11), so I could be totally wrong.

But since that sounds very tiring and difficult and I'm lazy, I'm more inclined to believe that whiny confrontational jackasses with terrible opinions are mostly receiving the treatment they whine about because they're whiny confrontational jackasses with terrible opinions.

[Flagg]

Yeah, it couldn't possibly be that it's just you who's just a jerk and stand-offish. Nope, must be something inherently wrong with atheism because you've done your research with an extensive testing group of one person.

As opposed to rigorous statistical analysis like "I read an article by a crazy bishop this one time years ago who said that atheists are teh evuls and clearly this means all believers hate atheists oh I'm so oppressed!!" am I right guys?

Somehow I don't think it's a coincidence that the atheists who complain the most about the horrible oppression they experience tend to be the ones who are also the the biggest *gasp shock* stand-offish jerks (and quite often massive bigots).

But who knows? I haven't done the statistical analysis that proves I'm not literally the single atheist on earth who, despite spending his entire existence in an area with an overwhelmingly Christian population, found that he stopped taking flak from christians when he stopped openly harassing them and their beliefs (which in my case was at the age of 11), so I could be totally wrong.

But since that sounds very tiring and difficult and I'm lazy, I'm more inclined to believe that whiny confrontational jackasses with terrible opinions are mostly receiving the treatment they whine about because they're whiny confrontational jackasses with terrible opinions.

Sounds to me like you're just a twat.

[the atom]

Sounds to me like you're just a twat.

Considering that my argument is basically 'your problem with people coming down on you probably has more to do with your shittiness then a lack of belief that's shared by a tenth of the U.S. population'....kinda? 11-year old me was terrible.